Realistic rendering of computer-generated images has become increasingly important in a variety of areas including, for example, graphic design, illustration, video games, and the like. 3-dimensional computer-generated images of environments typically include a source of light and resulting lighting and shadow effects on objects in the scene. Such global illumination effects often require a large amount of computation from the computer system. This may take long periods of time and an abundance of resources. Typically, such computations can be costly and/or inefficient. Despite recent interest in the areas of simulating global illumination effects in 3-dimensional computer generated scenes, no method or system has been devised that can perform the computations in an efficient manner while providing realistic illumination effects in a generated scene.
Thus, there is a need for a method or system in which global illumination effects may be efficiently and effectively rendered in a scene such as a computer-generated environment.